


Sorry

by ColdColdHeart



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Cylons, F/M, Gen, Season/Series 04, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 23:47:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15874188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColdColdHeart/pseuds/ColdColdHeart
Summary: D'Anna tries to manipulate Sam. But he's a simple person.





	Sorry

He’s starting his 318th game of solitaire when the knock comes at the door.

 No one has knocked since he moved in a week ago. This is Galen, probably, wanting to take a swig off his bottle or tell him the shift is starting early. He takes the two steps to the door, opens up. Not bothering to straighten his back, like he would have done in the old days just in case it was a superior officer.

 D’Anna slouches against the doorframe, wearing her civvies and reptilian grin, her eyes narrow but too bright, too focused. Just for a second, he thinks of fans who used to wait outside the locker room, back on Caprica. They also had a way of acting like they knew him.

 “How the frak did you get here?”

 She shrugs herself upright. “I was having a little planning session with your admiral and your president. I asked them where you might be found.”

 “No frakkin’ way.”

 “May I come in?” She doesn’t wait for an answer; she’s slipped past him and has gently closed the door before he can move. She stands with hands on hips, taking in his room. “This is rather a comedown in status, isn’t it?”

 Sam is a simple person. He’s known this since his childhood in a concrete tenement in Caprica City, when he never had the patience to follow the lively political discussions at the dinner table. His folks both came from old trade union families, but different unions with different ideas and party affiliations, and each of them brought friends who agreed with them, and so did his siblings when they were old enough, so it was an endless creative squabbling where nothing was ever really decided.

 There are ideas you argue about, and there are facts you have to grapple or live with. Fact: the thing standing in front of him is both complex and dangerous. It has tried to kill him before.

 He says, “You’ve got nothing to do here. I got nothing to say to you.”

 Her eyes stop surveying the room; light on him. “You’re wearing civilian clothes. Was it an honorable or a dishonorable discharge?”

 He shakes his head. _None of your frakkin’ business._

“Honorable. They wouldn’t have cast you out _and_ slapped you in the face, would they? Not after all your devoted service. Not after the explosives you lovingly wired to murder your own people.”

 He sits down on the bed; rests elbows on knees, gazes at the floor. He’s overheard some revisionist talk about the Resistance from pilots and members of the deck crew. Suddenly people are recalling the meetings that were obviously infiltrated, the bombs that failed to go off, and asking why. _Shit luck_ is no longer an acceptable explanation. _They wouldn’t even have had to know,_ people say. _Is it just chance they were the ones sending us out there to risk our lives? Something not right there. Hell, if they_ weren’t _sabotaging their own missions, I’d call that pretty frakked up programming._

 When he hears this kind of talk, he feels like grabbing the damn fools, shaking them, reminding them of every bomb that exploded exactly where and when it was supposed to. He tells himself they don’t mean it; they’re just overthinking the past because their backs are to a wall. They’re down about Earth. If Earth had been green, everything would’ve been different.

 He says wearily, “Get out. Now.”

 “But I’ve been meaning to apologize,” says D’Anna.

 She’s dangerous. It’s in her tone of voice, her movements; if she were human he would still know instinctively to keep her at arm’s length. She has Kara’s desire to stand out, to dominate, to be right, but none of the softness. None of the impulsiveness.

 “Apologize,” he repeats. _For killing my mother, my father, my sisters, my brother, my cousins, my ex-girlfriends, my teammates, my comrades-in-arms? For making me?_

She thinks she’s got an opening now, and she speaks briskly, biting her lip as if she really is contrite. “For the garage in Caprica City. When I found you in the rubble, I treated you _unacceptably_. Of course, I did assume you had set the bomb.”

 “Because I did.” He licks his lips. What if someone finds them here, talking? Surely Adama and Roslin didn’t tell her where to find him: that he won’t believe. But what if someone else did? What if someone is setting a trap? Someone like Seelix; someone who can barely even tolerate his presence on the flight deck after hours, doing inessential maintenance tasks or pushing a broom?

 He asked for work, any work, so Tyrol arranged something for both of them. And it does feel good to work hard with his hands. But they still get the looks, the glances and the hostile, lingering stares. The wide berths in the corridor.

 “I didn’t have any frakkin’ problem with Athena,” he says one day when he can’t take it anymore. “We got along with her, most of us. We just forgot about it. Frak it, she’s still out there, flying. What did _we_ do?”

 And Galen just looks at him with the face he has all the time now, like there’s a joke he gets and Sam doesn’t. “Ask Boomer.”

 “What’s that supposed to mean?”

 “They’re human.”

 *** 

But the Three is still talking. My gods, she’s very smooth. Like a diplomat, and so many words just flow out of her, none of which change his first impression. Her eyes glitter as she looks at him; the only word for that look is _covetous_. He doesn’t want to think about it.

 “If I had only known at the time,” she says, “I could have helped you. I could have eased you along. I firmly believe that everything you did, you did for a valid reason, even if the final reason behind that reason has yet to be revealed. God willed you to disrupt our settlements on Caprica and New Caprica to remind us that these were not the final settlements. It was your role in the plan to chase us from any place that wasn’t Earth.”

 The destiny crap again. Kara thought she had a destiny, and he accepted that. He accepted that human beings could have destinies, fates even, and still make their own choices when need be.

 He asks, “Are you saying it was frakking _programming_? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

 She bends toward him, taps his shoulder. “It’s just a word.”

 “No, it’s not. There’s a frakkin’ difference.” He fumbles for the terminology. “There’s a _difference_ between neural networks and — silicon pathways. Between people and toasters.”

 The looks, he knows now; that’s what the looks are saying. When Seelix gives him that blank dark stare, she is saying, _I refuse to pretend there is no difference_. And the ones who look away — they’re embarrassed. Not by the way they treat him, but by his existence. Because they were fooled.

 It embarrasses him, too. He’s waited for signs of something new — some cold, holier-than-thou, homicidal consciousness, akin to what he senses inside D’Anna. He’s waited to find out what it feels like to be willing to destroy whole worlds and peoples in the name of an idea.

 It hasn’t happened. He still doesn’t care about ideas. He cares about his parents in that concrete deathtrap, whether or not they really are his parents. He cared about the Eight, the one who died on the base ship when they met the Hybrid. She was barely breathing by the time he reached her; her eyes were unfocused. He’s seen people die; it was no different.

 “My poor boy, you’re so confused. You’re _so_ confused.” She brushes his cheek with her fingertips, and he winces and stands up. But she follows him and manages to corner him against the wall. He crosses his arms on his chest because he doesn’t want to have to touch her, even to thrust her aside.

 “You’re troubled,” she says, very low. “We can help you with these things, do you know? On the baseship, you would remember what it’s like to be among friends who support you. Not people who spit on you as you pass in the halls — and they do, don’t they, really or figuratively? Tory tells me it was hard for you even before they knew. She says you have a hard time with ambiguity.”

 Frakking Tory. Her new best friend, her sister. “I guess she’s given you the whole frakking analysis.”

 “She tells me you look to other people for guidance. Your wife, generally. And when you lost your wife, you turned elsewhere.”

 “For a frak!” he says, too loud. What he and Tory did while the music was jangling in their heads is one of those memories he’s managed to shove away in some dark compartment of his mind. Not because it was bad, as frakking goes, but because of what happened afterward. Tory is all about ideas, and he always suspected she would use that — the way their bodies came together, needing each other — as the basis on which to build some theory he wouldn’t like at all.

 “She is rather a twisted little creature of God, isn’t she?” D’Anna says, as if reading his mind. “I want to trust her, of course, as I would myself, but I find myself wondering how much of it is pure self-interest. She reminds me of the Eights: barely a step from human.”

 “And how many steps are you?” He doesn’t like the sound of his own voice: clumsily sarcastic, angry. He is not handling this well. Galen would sit and stare back at her with those cold dark eyes of his, answering her questions in monosyllables or mirroring them back to her, until she gave up and went away. In fact, that is probably what has already happened. Surely she went to Galen first.

 “That’s precisely what I would like to know.” She angles her head at him. “And I would have asked you in the temple when I first met you, all of you — it was a first meeting of sorts, wasn’t it? I had so many questions, but God chose to leave them unanswered.”

 He shakes his head. “I wasn’t there.”

 “But you were! You were in spirit.” He doesn’t like the glossy sheen on her eyes, or the way she presses closer to him. “And you were bright and unbelievably beautiful. What you are now is the mere shadow of what I saw, and if I didn’t believe you could become that again, you could be it —”

 Her eyes are unfocused now; she’s wandering in the mystical realms of her imagination, and he uses it as an opportunity to sidestep her and make for the safety of the door. Frakking fanatic toaster. “You’re all as crazy as Leoben.”

 She skips to catch up with him; gets there as he does and presses her shoulder and palm to the door, staring straight up at him in that brazen, intimate way. It occurs to him suddenly and uncomfortably that if he had met Kara under other circumstances — here on the ship, say, on her turf rather than his, or later, when she was already making batshit pronouncements about Earth — well then maybe, just maybe, she would have seemed just this selfish to him, and just this repugnant. Without their days in the irradiated landscape, without the arrow he carefully hid and brought to her ( _why? how had he known how much it mattered?)_ it might have been different. It was an energy like this he needed, but D’Anna’s energy has gone a bad way. And sometimes, he has to admit, Kara’s energy seems to go a bad way, too.

 “Forget Leoben.” Her voice has gone mellow and soothing again. “That model’s played its role; it’s inconsequential. They do what I tell them, Sam. The Twos, the Sixes, the Eights. They know I take precedence, because they know _you_ do. If you would simply take your rightful — ”

 He reaches for the handle. “You frakkin’ apologized. Now get out.”

 “How often does your wife visit?”

 He stares straight into her eyes. Complex and mean and sometimes surprisingly easy to read. Just like a person.

 “She doesn’t understand, does she? She tells herself you’re the same person, just as _she’s_ the same person who came back from a jaunt among the dead. But it’s not enough.”

 He moves before he realizes it, and now she’s the one backing away. A Three scared of him. Scratch that: _the_ Three. The only one left in the universe.

 “Because she knows what you really are now. Someone too weak to— ”

 He takes her by the throat. Easy as nothing. She doesn’t resist for the first few seconds; she even smiles knowingly, as if they were engaged in some kind of perverse Cylon foreplay. But when he tightens his grip with both hands, she squirms and raises hers to try to pry them away.

 He looks down at her, this thing. This struggling, flailing, evil living thing. “What am I too weak to do?”

 She gasps. “My God, you’ve found your strength. It’s beautiful.”

 “It’s what?” She can die; he can kill her. Would people look at him differently if he killed her? Or would it only deepen their disgust, their mistrust? Would they take it as a desperate attempt at denial?

 She tries to kick him, so he presses her harder against the wall. Her eyes close and her lips move, as if she’s praying, and without thinking he asks, “What?”

 “Forgive me.” She’s saying the same words aloud now, not a prayer at all. “Forgive me.”

 He doesn’t forgive her. He releases her. “Get out.”

 She reels for an instant; sinks to her knees, her shoulders shaking. He turns away, and the next thing he knows she’s standing in front of him again, rubbing her throat. Her eyes rise to him, still too bright. “You’re so tall. So strong. And for a second there, just a second, you were so sure of yourself. It was lovely, Sam. I can help you feel it again.”

 “No frakking thanks.” He steers her to the door now; opens it. “I don’t know exactly what you came for, but you’re not getting it. I’m not going over there with you. Not now, not ever.”

 She stands in the doorway, backlit. “You’d rather hide in a hole that stinks of cigars and stale booze, waiting for them to come look at you like an animal in a cage? _This way to the sorry-assed Cylon who wants to be human_?”

 “I would. Yeah.” He slams the door.

But not in time to avoid hearing the last thing she says, which is: “If you embraced your strength, Kara might really love you. She might love you, Sam.”


End file.
